Military Stories

Decision at Sea is a powerful and illuminating look at pivotal moments in the history of the Navy and of the United States. It is also a compelling study of the unchanging demands of leadership at sea, where commanders must make rapid decisions in the heat of battle with lives--and the fate of nations--hanging in the balance.

The authors' multi-faceted approach looks critically at earlier histories of the battle and Japanese naval doctrine and other Japanese sources. It also debunks myths and corrects errors passed on as fact through several preceding histories of the battle. The book examines the strategic context of the battle, provides a detailed narrative of the battle itself, and also examines why the Japanese lost at Midway and repercussions in the larger context of the war.

A famed ocean explorer, discoverer of the Titantic, offers an illustrated chronicle of a search for the ships sunk during the Battle of Midway, including the Yorktown, and features reminiscences from American and Japanese veterans of the conflict. TV tie-in. BOMC & History

To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company.

American Spartans is the first modern battle history of the Marines in a generation, showing exactly how "the few and the proud" have performed in key conflicts from Iwo Jima to the present, and how they have prepared and reinvented themselves between the wars.

A volume of true training stories by young Marines who served in World War II, Iraq, and other wars from the past sixty years reveals the brutal or exacting techniques employed during their training, in an account that shares additional historical information about the U.S. Marine Corps.

Already a classic of war reporting and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. The following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly wounded.
Drawing on interviews from both sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Bowden’s minute-by-minute narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written -a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.

Explore the secret, dangerous, and specialized world of the U.S. Army's most elite strike force as an expert in the field presents an informative guide to their intense training, risky missions, special skills, clandestine activities, and more.

One of the great heroes of the Iraq War, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia captures the brutal action and raw intensity of leading his Third Platoon, Alpha Company, into a lethally choreographed kill zone: the booby-trapped, explosive-laden houses of Fallujah's militant insurgents. Bringing to searing life the terrifying intimacy of hand-to-hand infantry combat, this stunning war memoir features an indelibly drawn cast of characters, not all of whom would make it out of the city alive, as well as chilling accounts of Bellavia's singular courage: Entering one house alone, he used every weapon at his disposal in the fight of his life against America's most implacable enemy